I saw lots of corn. We drove back from Nebraska yesterday, all in one day. That was a lot of corn for one day. I don't think I'm all here now, but I felt the need to post again before I got lazy. Anyway, Masters of Education (I like that name, it's kind of like Masters of the Universe, can't you just see it "I am Daphne Haddad, Master of Education." so cool.) is here now, so I can get into the nice Mills computer labs.
I spent three full days visiting my family and two of those days I spent at the zoo. I love the Omaha zoo. My mom got us a pass and I plan to visit it more at Christmastime. I wonder what zoos are like in the winter. Anyway, they just built a whole new gorilla complex (which my brother refers to as "The Valley of the Apes"). It's very strange to watch the gorillas come up and stare through the glass at me and realize that their gestures remind me a lot of my grandpa. I think my favorite part of the zoo is the giraffes. They look like something from a strange fantastic story, nothing about them looks natural. We watched the giraffe keeping herding the giraffes into their building at the end of the day and he came only halfway up their legs. Speaking of tall things, there is a huge cornfield directly behind our house and I went wandering around back there one evening. The corn must be about nine feet tall and the leaves are so big it's hard to walk. It's like a jungle when you get in there. You can't see more than a few feet in any direction.
I've ditched that Charles Williams book I was reading and have taken up Robin McKinley's Spindle's End. I love McKinley's retellings of fairy tales. In fact, any retelling of a fairy tale is pretty interesting to me, just to see what the author choses to elaborate on. This particular story is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. Like in most modern retellings the handsome prince is almost nonexistant and the strength of ordinary people is emphasized. I like McKinley, though, because unlike a lot of authors these days she leaves in the magic. It's so disheartening for me, who grew up with all the fairy tales, to read a retelling where the magic is entirely discounted.
I've been very silent lately and I'll tell you why. It's because they shut down every single computer lab at Covenant this summer and if I want to get on the internet I either have to do it fast in the BEST office over lunch or take my computer up the hill to Covenant after I get off work. So I have been hoarding all of my great thoughts. And now I've forgotten what they were. I've been reading a lot, reading Madeleine L'Engle and Charles Williams. I'm reading Williams' The Greater Trumps right now and finding it a bit painful how in the midst of strange magical happenings he is trying to cram his message of love down my throat. I read some of the Dune series earlier this summer and I'll probably be getting back to that soon. I've also been trying to figure out what to write about in my SIP. I think I'm going to write something about mythology so I'm reading some Joseph Campbell. I've always been interested in myths and I used Joseph Campbell in a paper I wrote in high school that I really enjoyed and I always meant to come back to him. I bumped into The Power of Myth in McKay the other day while I was searching for a purpose for my SIP so I thought I'd see if it helped.
I'm back in Nebraska for a few days, visiting my family and the Omaha zoo (an amazing place, enough to make visiting Nebraska worthwhile).